


Like a Target in a Fish Pond

by Simply8Steps



Series: Epics Pentathalon [2]
Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Post-Daybreak, Post-Finale, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-14 04:11:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11200179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Simply8Steps/pseuds/Simply8Steps
Summary: She visits, sometimes..., and it makes about just as much sense as a skipping stone.





	Like a Target in a Fish Pond

**Author's Note:**

> Also originally posted to LJ 01/01/2013 for the BSG-Epics community's Pentathalonfor the K/L requirement. This was also my first try at this particular pairing.

Kara thinks, when she meets his eyes through the bars of the brig, that she and Lee have been marked – since childhood, since the accident… since death knocked on their doors and they both answered, “Yes.”  
  
At the very least, she has the scars and the ghost of her mother’s hard face. He has the cropped hair cut, the tensed jaw, and the live angry silence that flows through him like a razor-sharp live current. They are both seeking a repose, a substitute of sorts, and they are both restless when their search fails.  
  
So they turn and collapse into one another, repeatedly and sometimes destructively. The stone skips, they fly apart even as the ripples spread out - until the stone finds its next step. They crash together again.  
  
It happens when they first meet, it almost happens again under a tree off the edge of a cemetery soaked and choking on grief - in the midst of a space battle, on a semi-divine-political quest for answers, in the midst of upheaval, during a joyful celebration, in one of the least used heads on a battlestar, in a heat soaked raptor… and the list goes on and on, and each time, they separate, and they fight and spear one another with words meant to throw the other farther away, until – suddenly they just sink.  
  
When Kara comes back, and Lee kisses her, he wakes her up, and a jolt runs through her at the realization. The rush of kissing Lee before running back into the fray… he realizes it too. The stone had resurfaced, and they are no longer quite skipping but skidding along. Their rhythm is old but less frantic. They are older, having lived three (and a half, she likes to tease him later) lives between them.  
  
And so they take their time, and make their space when they can. Construct the time and place as they never had before, and it doesn’t feel quite like a betrayal to Sam (and he to Dee), because love is complicated and it has taken them a few years to sort that the frak out.  
  
But they don’t have enough time for that – they never did.  
  


* * *

  
Kara comes to visit Lee every year on the day of their arrival to the second Earth, and she always does her best to scare him to death. (The one time she leaped out of the savannah grass like one of the big predatory cats he had seen resulted in her almost being _literally_ speared. She didn’t quite try to surprise him with a weapon in his hand again – or perhaps, only a few more times.)  
  


* * *

  
She visits him once at the edge of a cliff, when he is barely hanging on mid-climb, and she crouches, bent over the ledge above him and tugs at the wild mass of hair that grows and tumbles around his head. “You need a haircut.”  
  
He almost falls off the cliff that time and glares reproachfully at her grinning face. He’s older now, gray sprinkling his temples, though his body is still fit and his eyes still the same brilliant and intelligent blue they always were. She hasn’t changed at all – body or soul. “You need to stop doing that. One day you will kill me, but it won’t be the way you want it.”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“You clearly want to give me a heart-attack, but it’s clearly cheating if I fall to my death isn’t it?”  
  
She snorts and leans down to catch him face-to-face, “That’s not my plan.”  
  
“Yeah Kara, because your plans always work out _so well_.”  
  
“They saved _your_ butt more than once didn’t they?”  
  
“Sure.” She follows him to the top of the cliff that day, sometimes tumbling small stones around him in small sprays that had him fearing a larger collapse from the cliff face, but they make it in time to see the edges of the sun reach the horizon. As always, she disappears, and he promises to remember.  
  


* * *

  
On her last visit, she comes a day early, startling his aim for fish in a small, clear pool. “You just made me lose my lunch.”  
  
“That ugly, am I? That deserves a punch to the face.”  
  
He’s in his sixties now, and time on Earth has made him look a bit like his father, but not really.”You know what I mean.”  
  
“Heh – I had to come surprise you. You were getting complacent after you finally made that time marker of yours.”  
  
Lee rolls his eyes. Her teasing, just like her face, hasn’t changed at all.  
  
“I’ll cook dinner.”  
  
He crooks his right eyebrow.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Nothing, but do you know how to prepare raw fish from nothing without a kitchen?”  
  
“Of course, what do you think I am?”  
  
“A hotshot pilot with reckless, spotty plans.”  
  
“Eons and ages ago.”  
  
“But still true.” He smiles then and tosses her his first catch.  
  
There’s five by the time he is finished (he’s hoping to save two for drying, just in case), and they sit around the fire pit she has dug. Two of the fish sit on the sticks, getting smoked dry. The other three are wrapped in aromatic leaves and baking on a large stone in the middle of the fire.  
  
She stays past sunset for the first time since they’ve landed on Earth. He doesn’t question it, not seeing the point to it. Instead, they lie under the stars that night, and he talks to her about the shifting constellations until he falls asleep.  
  
He doesn’t wake up the next day, and Kara bends over and kisses his eyelids softly. “On to life number four, Lee.”

  
  
**_Fin._ **


End file.
